Bites from other Blogs

Chiffon cakes are light and fluffy, a great dessert to have around in the summertime when you don’t feel like munching oni a heavy or overly-rich dessert. Like angel food cakes, many are only lightly flavored. Unlike angel food cakes, chiffon cakes can actually pack in a lot of flavor. Pureedfruit makes a great addition to chiffon cakes. Fuzzy Bakes used fresh, ripe mango to make a Mango Chiffon Cake. Be sure to taste-test your mangoes before you start baking, as some can be a little fiberous and you want to have the silkiest, sweetest mango you can get to achieve the best results on this cake.

I love empanadas, the little pocket-sized South and Central American stuffed pastries, and have had them with all kinds of meat and vegetarian fillings. They’re quite easy to make and are a great lighter meal (unless you want to eat a whole bunch and make it a big meal), or hors d’oeuvre to serve to party guests. 5 second rule‘s Spinach, Brie, and Apple Empanadas have an unusual, but delicious-sounding filling that I haven’t encountered before. These vegetarian empanadas are sweet and savory, thanks to apples and golden raisins mixed in with spinach, garlic and brie.

The Coconut Peanut Squares recipe at Angie’s Recipes features a combination of ingredients I haven’t seen put together in a while. The bars start with a shortbread-type cookie dough that is full of hazelnuts and shredded coconut. That bottom layer is finished off with a creamy layer of peanut butter topping. The flavors all manage to come together in the end, and you’ll have something that’s a little more like a candy bar (without chocolate, however) than your average shortbread cookie. The recipe calls for German #405 flour, this is similar to cake or pastry flour in the US.

Without making them yourself, it can be hard to tell one batch of brownies from another. Rich, chocolaty and moist, many brownies look similar from photograph to photograph, blog post to blog post. If names are anything to go by, however, I would have to give an edge to the Seduction Brownies recently baked by Cookie Baker Lynn. The brownies, which are from a David Lebovitz recipe, are moist and dense, so they taste very rich. They are also topped with a layer of indulgent ganache that is, for a chocolate fan, very seductive.

The thing that caught my eye about Good Life Eats‘ post on Creamy Vanilla Apricot Sorbet was not the delightful-sounding sorbet, which is made with lots of fresh apricots and is lighter than regular ice cream. It was the White Chocolate Almond Bark that accompanied it. The bark is easy to make, just a thin layer of white chocolate topped off with crunchy nuts, but the flavor works well with the ice cream and it is something you could easily whip up on a few moments notice to accompany other dishes.